Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @04:04PM
from the wonder-if-it'll-run-crysis dept.

MojoKid writes: "NVIDIA recently announced that it would offer a free 24-hour test drive of NVIDIA GRID to anyone who wanted to see what the technology could do. It turns out to be pretty impressive. NVIDIA's GRID is a virtual GPU technology that allows for hardware acceleration in a virtual environment. It's designed to run in concert with products from Citrix, VMWare, and Microsoft, and to address some of the weaknesses of these applications. The problem with many conventional Virtual Desktop Interfaces (VDIs) is that they're often either too slow for advanced graphics work or unable to handle 3D workloads at all. Now, with GRID, NVIDIA is claiming that it can offer a vGPU passthrough solution that allows remote users to access a virtualized desktop environment built around a high-end CPU and GPU. The test systems the company is using for these 24-hour test drives all use a GRID K520. That's essentially two GK104 GPUs on a single PCB with 8GB of RAM. The TD program is still in beta, the deployment range is considerable, and the test drives themselves are configured for a 1366x768 display at 30 FPS and a maximum available bandwidth cap of 10Mbit."

It wouldn't surprise me at all. For some specialist workloads, GPUs are amazingly fast. But if you still need a GUI, why not use the built-in graphics processing from the CPU, to avoid any load on the GPU doing the real work?

Outsourcing CAD (drafters) work only to be reviewed by a select few managers. The savings would more than make up for the hardware. Just think about it, they don't have to pay them benefits. Hiring and firing is just a mouse-click away. NEXT!!!

I looked at this tech when it was actually new, around a year ago, and admittedly just pulled the datasheet today to double check my recollection. I'm glad that the limitations are less severe than I thought.

There's 2 big use cases for desktop virtualization. The common one is to run a ton of desktops of off little hardware, with the idea that most people only read emails and use MS Word all day anyway. Big cost saving.

The other is purely to have desktops centralized in a data center so you can have data center admins deal with them instead of needing (as many) on site tech monkeys.

I worked in companies where it was the later. The users still needed 16+ gb of RAM, dedicated powerful hardware, etc, but now if so

Exactly this. We investigated moving our engineers (running Pro/E / Creo) and our drafters (running Autocad) to this setup because they're the only ones not running a VDI or VDI-like setup. We're a company well suited to this because we already have the entire setup minus the NVidia gear. We ended up skipping it (for now at least) because of one two things: money and productivity. The cost of switching to a virtual environment was significantly more than the cost of getting them all new hardware. We might l

Will there really be lag? You can try the same tech they sell as a consumer product, game streaming to SteamOS. And the WiiU is similar. With a low input lag LCD monitor and a gigabit network I'm sure the latency would be rather low.Then you have actual performance advantages running on the server (except a typical Xeon will run about 1GHz slower, save for the really expensive ones). You can do something stupid like 384GB memory on the server, and then data is loaded from terabyte SSDs or fast SAN instead o

We very recently went through adding Grid cards to our VMware View infrastructure. The Grid K1 & K2 cards are a tradeoff on either more kepler processors or more cuda cores in addition to the quantity of RAM. VMware View can utilize a Grid card in either vSGA or vDGA modes (shared or direct passthrough of a kepler processor). From what I can discern, Dell only officially supports the Grid cards in their R720 server. That particular chassis can only accept 2 Grid cards max. So you can get your choice of 2, 4, 6, or 8 kepler processors. If you're using vDGA mode, you're creating a direct VDI desktop allocation of that core with DirectPath I/O. While this means that one desktop is going to have great performance, it means it isn't available for anyone else and you lose vMotion capability. If you run in vSGA mode, the performance per machine isn't as good as vDGA but more desktops can utilize the hardware. There arn't any good whitepapers I've found yet describing how far you can stretch a Grid K1, but the rule of thumb I got from another company who has ran them through their benchmark lab got around 25 desktops per K1 max. Therefore, assuming you've got a pair of them that means you can run ~50 desktops with a reduced performance when compared to vDGA. The technology still appears to be young to me, but we decided to take a chance and see how far we could take it.

That link is referencing a citrix only idea, but their general distinctions between user types is apt. As of View 5.3, there is no longer a lockin to NVIDIA products yet nobody has made any yet to my knowledge. Intel & AMD are on the list to produce something sometime.